Authors of three studies (Leonard Lieberman, Blaine W. Stevenson, Larry T. Reynolds, and Matt Cartmill) agree that the concept of race has approached its lowest level of acceptance in a century. However, one of the studies (that of Cartmill) seems to show no significant change from 1965 to 1996. We analyze this paradox in terms of possible differences in the populations studied. [Keywords: race, physical anthropology, variation]
This article examines the potential offered by microcomputer technology to radically improve the effectiveness and productivity of team field research in anthropology. Microcomputers can offer in situ storage, retrieval, and analysis of field data and information. A microcomputer system may function as both a stand alone device and as a terminal to a mainframe, time sharing computer. Drawing from pilot projects using microcomputers, the various dimensions of feedback, consequences for fieldwork strategies, and efficiency are explored.
race, cline, racism, culture, ethnicity] It is an apparent contradiction that race has been rejected in anthropology, but that rejection has led to perplexing questions relating to race. Our students should be informed of the decline of biological race, the scientific evidence and reasons for that decline, and how the rejection of biological race has contributed to a new set of problems which educational anthropologists must confront with our students. In what follows we document the decline of race, present the reasons for that decline, and then discuss the controversial conceptual issues that have arisen and which we and our students should analyze and incorporate into our understanding of the biological and cultural diversity of humankind. We have found that our students in introductory physical anthropology and cultural anthropology classes grasp the reality of human biological variation most accurately if they view them in terms of clines, defined as geographic gradations, rather than races as distinct homogeneous populations. It is also important to view cultures as the dynamic expression of their history and ecology rather than being determined by the biology of race.
With the decline and apparent death of the race concept in anthropology it seems to be assumed that attention to racism is not necessary, a situation referred to as being "color blind" (Harrison 1995; Shanklin 1999; Mukhopadhayay and Moses 1997). Mistakenly, we and others thought that by rejecting biological race, racialization and racism in American science and society would be diminished. In this paper we will explore the context for the apparent decline and the revival of anti-racism, involving political, organizational, linguistic and other cultural influences. Political Influences on the Decline of Racism During the later decades of the twentieth century, the race concept declined (Lieberman et al., 2003a, 2003b), and efforts by anthropologists to study "race" also were said to decline, replaced by color blindness towards Americans of African, Indigenous (Amerindian), and Asian origins. For example, to be color blind means recognizing that black African-American culture is to be valued as an amalgam of African heritage, local innovations, acculturation processes, and adaptations to and diffusion from the dominant Anglo-American culture of the United States. Not to be color blind means that so-called social problems of poverty, crime, and low IQ scores, are best understood as consequences of the structure of a racialized social order. The political context of the decline of anti-racism involves the political atmosphere during and since World War II in which rejection of racism required criticism of American racialization and racial (read: "racist" 1) stratification. During World War II, "the just war," many anthropologists were employed in support of that effort, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Benedict and Gene Weltfish's well-known pamphlet, The Races of Mankind, was published in 1943. During World War II the internment of Japanese Americans into iso
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